


Vigil

by bagog



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types
Genre: Background Relationships, I don't know how to tag this, M/M, Mostly Gen, Time Skips, please help
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-06 04:44:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20285629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bagog/pseuds/bagog
Summary: The Prothean VI left behind to warn the next cycle about the Reaper threat gains new purpose now that the Reapers are defeated.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mareel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mareel/gifts).

> Every N7 month, I write a story about Vigil, the Prothean VI. Over the years, I've kept a sort of through-line in all three of the stories. For me, it's a celebration of Mass Effect itself. Not sure if I can continue this series, so I figured I'd post the chapters I have on AO3. Maybe turn on Vigil's theme while reading?
> 
> Gifted to Mareel, because I admire her so much and she always helps me see new corners of a fandom I've loved for years. Keep telling your stories.

The ancient computer sputtered, clicked, and then—with a deep, almost musical drone—the hologram appeared as a fractured pillar of light. The orange light lit the chamber, the broken stasis pods, the vine covered walkways, the eerie stone of Ilos.

“Searching for time index…” the voice which came from the VI was placid, a comforting monotone.

“No need,” Liara deactivated her omni-tool and smiled. “It’s been 837 years, 19 days, 4 hours since your last activation, Vigil.”

The VI flickered. In her younger years, the sight might have brought a tear to Liara’s eye: since her youth, on her first visit to Ilos, the Vigil VI had become mythologized in her mind. First as a priceless key to understanding the Protheans, then as a possible aid to help them against the Reapers, then as another casualty of the war.

Those few years of the war had been the longest of her life. Her father, an eminent matriarch, had insisted that it was a wisdom all asari learned that any odd span of years was important, but ultimately inconsequential.

Now a matriarch herself, Liara had discovered her own wisdom: she’d had a long and full life, but Liara T’soni belonged to those blissful decades after the Reaper war had ended. She had parceled herself out to the short lifespans of her friends gladly. She belonged to them, and on the Normandy.

And as they passed, one by one, her mythological memory of Vigil had changed as well. Now she looked back on it as a friend.

“My program should have decompiled after being accessed by an organic being…”

“Yes, it did. Don’t worry, Vigil,” the chill of the chamber caused her to zip her collar higher. She stepped closer to the orange glow of the holographic sentinel as if he were a crackling fire. “It’s taken me some time to recompile you. I’m sorry to say it will take a few moments for all of your protocols to load.”

“You visited once before, with the other organics.”

“That’s right. Shepard was his name. The other was called Kaidan.”

“The conduit…”

“We made it.”

“The Reapers…”

“Gone,” she smiled a little at the impassivity of the hologram. She was certain that any pensiveness or surprise you noted in the way it flickered or bounced was purely her imagination, but this was no reason not to believe in it anyhow. She continued in a perfect and eloquent Prothean: “Shepard, whom you helped, destroyed them.”

“Then my purpose is complete,” Vigil answered in kind: a rich and received dialect of the Prothean language, smoother and slower than Liara’s battle-tailored dialect, learned through diligent practice with Javik hundreds of years ago. “Please, you may disconnect this Vigil and close this research facility.”

“You don’t want to know how we did it?” She grinned.

“We did not anticipate of a way the Reapers could be truly defeated. I am not programmed to even wonder how this could be possible. My task was to regulate this facility and to give access to future cycles to aid them in surviving.”

She knew it was strange to look on this elementary construct as her friend. She had been a gob-smacked girl the first time she had seen it, heart pounding in her chest as they chased Saren and the geth. But, if she were taking her father’s advice, a friendship of a few minutes was not terribly different to an asari matriarch than a friendship of several decades. Not really.

“Vigil,” she said gently, as if speaking to a skittish bird, “Over the years I’ve uncovered a _lot_ of Prothean ruins. I’ve been to other research facilities, temples, buried cities. And I’ve met other VI constructs: Vendetta, Vexation, Votive. School children now program more complex VIs than your matrix. Do you know why I’ve spent the last 112 years recompiling your program?”

“I have never ‘wanted’ to know something… I have always had access to any piece of information the organics of this facility required.”

“It’s because you helped me, and you helped my friend, Shepard. You gave us hope when we had none.”

And so, after a long time, she looked back on her ‘friend’ Vigil the same way she remembered her friends from the Normandy. No longer with grief at their absence in her long life, but with a placid and reverent love. Their lives and their stories still soared above and around the years of memories she was forced to build without them.

Their stories, the way each of them grew before her eyes. The way they loved. The way they fought. What the lived and died for. Liara belonged to them, even as those stories now belonged to her.

“I am designed to assist.” It spoke slowly. “But my facility is destroyed and the Reapers are defeated. I have no purpose and no ability to assist in matters not related to these two functions.”

“I’m giving you a new purpose, Vigil.” She eased herself to the ground and crossed her legs. “I’ve upgraded your power cells: they will keep your program operational for another million years, if necessary. For fifty thousand years, you were ready to help any species who found you survive the threat of the Reapers. Now you are going to tell anyone who asks that today, 833 years ago, your vigilance was rewarded. And Commander Shepard saved the galaxy. I want you to make sure that, in 10,000 years, people _remember._ You’re going to spread that message, Vigil: that faith is rewarded. That when the people of this galaxy come together, we can do the impossible. That the choices are hard. That one person inspired the galaxy.”

“…Tell me about Commander Shepard, please.”

Shepard was flawed. Was noble. Changed and grew and inspired his friends to change and grow. Vigil, her last old friend, was coming into his own story, even as hers was coming to a close.

“I’m going to tell you about _all _of them. Every single thing until I’ve told it all.”


	2. Chapter 2

It had shocked Tuchanka when he left, Clan Urdnot formerly requesting to know of his status. They offered an entourage of 22 warriors, four Battlemasters, and a shaman to see him on his journey. The pyjaks were only worried about him dying off world—Urdnot was promised some relics when he passed, certainly—and they weren’t entirely unjustified.

Urdnot Mordin, as he was once known, was exhausted down past his soul. At 1600 years old, he was the oldest living Krogan outside of mythology, and the longest ruling chieftain of his clan. As Patriarch of Clan Mordin—separated from his father’s clan peacefully when he was less than a hundred years old—he had transformed Tuchanka, he had carved his people’s name into the stars, he had worked wonders.

“Glyph,” his voice was gravelly. He so rarely spoke these days, his attendants so rarely let him. But now, in his old workshop, his robes laid aside, he felt young in spirit again.

A tiny flickering ball of light appeared, delightfully primitive technology.

“…timestamp, 3774…”

“Do you know who I am?”

“…you are Patriarch Mordin of Clan Mordin,” the ball of light answered.

“That’s not what you called me when we first met.”

“…’Mordy’.”

“Knee-high to varren the first time we met, Glyph.” He was reviewing the VI’s code as he addressed it. It had been in a laboratory very much like this one that he had first met a VI construct. In his Aunt Liara’s lab, he had first discovered the passion for science that his father seemed to expect from him—with Wrex’s usual hesitation about those things. His Aunt had kept the VI around her as the centuries passed by, and it had always seemed quaint to Mordin. At the end of his life, he understood.

“Where is Doctor T’soni?”

“She’s gone, Glyph,” Mordin answered. His Aunt and her construct called him Mordy long after even the Citadel Council referred to him reverently as ‘Patriarch Mordin’. “She’s been dead almost 500 years.”

“I had feared this was the answer.” Mordin knew the VI couldn’t feel grief, but he allowed himself the little flight of fancy that perhaps his tone was soaked in it anyway. A woman like Liara should be mourned long after her death, deserved for her loss to be a tragedy to the universe well after she had passed into legend. “How may I assist you, Mordy?”

“I’ve come for the Vigil program, Glyph.”

“That Virtual Construct is restricted for Doctor T’soni’s personal access only. Should you wish to explore Vigil’s mission on Illos, please see the exhibit at—“

“Override access,” he barked. The orb hovered there a moment, thinking.

“…input override code.”

“My name is Urdnot Mordin,” he said the words firmly, the way he had been rehearsing in his head for the last 500 years. “’I’ll always remember the way the stars looked in London, when the skies cleared.’”

A line from his aunt’s favorite song, and his too, as a child, before Gilbert and Sullivan became the only music he could really think to.

“Code recognized. Please recite verse two for override access.”

That surprised him. Before she had died, his aunt had only told him he’d need the first line of that verse to access her files. For a brief moment, he considered simply breaking through Glyph’s code—it would be a challenge, and it had been so long since he’d gotten his hands dirty. But Liara was a skilled old blue witch, and it wasn’t worth risking.

She only wanted to see if he remembered their time together as fondly as she had. And he did.

_I’ll always remember the way the stars looked in London, when the skies cleared._  
How the rain stopped and the moon shone and the quiet in the streets, my love.  
There was Cephus and his queen, and Orion looked so bright, and the Pleiades above,  
And that bright and yawning moon we hadn’t seen in what felt like years reappeared   
I don’t know where you are,  
If you’re safe around some shining star  
Far away,  
Or if your body’s floating down  
From that burning battleground  
Won today.  
  


Glyph made a chiming sound, and morphed into the figure of an asari matriarch. Liara T’soni. Gentle even as a hologram, present even though her message was prerecorded.

_“Hello, Mordy.” _The message began. The Code displayed before Mordin, and he knew it was not an interactive VI “_I’m sorry I haven’t left you a VI, but at my age, the idea of some facsimile of me walking around makes my skin crawl. I’m proud of you for remembering that verse, but you’re an eidetekker so I suppose I’m not surprised. Honored, is the better word, perhaps, hmm? Do you suppose anyone still sings that song? I remember being stuck on Earth after the war, the rolling power outtages, no extranet. You’d hear people singing that song on the street corner._

_Listen to me ramble, though. A part of my heart will always be in London, on Earth. Now, you didn’t come to hear me ramble on like this. You’re here for Vigil. And if I knew you, nephew, you’ve waited till the last possible minute to come and get him, haven’t you?”_

Mordin laughed at that.

“_I hope old age agrees with you more than it did me. There are some things you should know about the Vigil program…”_

For a few minutes, it was as if they were back recalibrating spent Mass Relays to send an ark ship across the intergalactic dark space to catch up with the Andromeda Initiative. But all too soon, the technical readouts were complete, and his holographic ghost of an aunt was saying goodbye again.

_“You’ll never be so old where I won’t be proud of you, Mordin. I’m honored you remembered me, and our work together. Goodbye, Mordy. We’re all waiting for you ‘around some shining star.’”_

And she was gone.

The dark laboratory was silent, as if the machines were waiting for Mordin’s grief to crest and fall as his Krogan resilience and deep scientific patience to nullify the sorrow.

Then, Vigil appeared.

“I am Vigil,” it said, “Good morning. Who am I addressing?”

“My name is Mordin,” the old krogan said after a long moment, rolling the sleeves down to ward off the chill in the musty laboratory. “Born to Clan Urdnot of Wrex, Hero of Tuchanka, and Bakara, Hero of Tuchanka. My namesake is Mordin Solus, Savior of Tuchanka. I am patriarch of Clan Mordin. I have won battles, I have crushed my enemies, I have built cities, I have made wonders and crossed the darkness between galaxies.

“I have Seen the Reapers. I was a friend to Shepard, Hero of Tuchanka, and to Kaidan Alenko. I was a Clan Brother to Grunt, Chief of Urdnot. I was a friend to Liara T’soni, and to James Vega, and to Jeffrey Moreau, and to Samantha Traynor, and the Justicar Samara, and to Miranda Lawson, and to Jacob Taylor, and to Javik, and to EDI.

I am all that remains. I am Mordin.” He sighed deeply, letting him sink back into his chair. “And I would like to hear a story.”


	3. Chapter 3

When he had been a young man, Ryder had looked up at these stars and doubted everything about himself. He’d spoken to a friend of his, when he was still a teenager on the Citadel: Pek’aela, from a system buried deep in the Orion arm of the Milky Way. To Pek’aela, the idea of sailors using _stars _to navigate seemed absurd. At night, the stars on its homeworld were like writhing static wherein fragments of blushing dark were tossed about.

Pek’aela’s people, in ancient times, had never even conceived of a ‘galaxy’, or ‘another galaxy’. Or Andromeda. Today was a day to remember, and Ryder wondered why his memory came back to this.

“How do we set a course, SAM, if there are too many stars?”

“Pathfinder?”

The AI’s voice was different, these days. Dryly quizzical.

“’Pathfinder’s gonna find a path,’” Ryder quoted, another old memory, tested the fit of the golden wedding ring on his finger, “’Better get a good look at those stars. You’re the one who gets to connect the dots. You get to make all the new constellations.’”

SAM said nothing.

The scourge used to remind him of Pek’aela’s homeworld. So much easier to navigate by looking at its tendrils and its forking tongues. In Heleus, where space wasn’t ‘empty’, star-to-star mattered less than… find your way around the mountains and valleys of the scourge. But that was a long time passed.

“You haven’t called me Pathfinder in a while, SAM,” Ryder smirked. He spoke to his reflection in the dark window like he was speaking to the AI itself. In the centuries since his joining, he frowned when the AI voice frowned, he laughed when SAM meant to laugh. His grandkids found it less and less endearing with each generation. “What gives?”

“You are deep in thought,” SAM smirked. “It seemed that the added reverence would be appreciated on this occasion.”

“Never been one for reverence.” He looked back at his ring, sank back into his chair.

“I know,” SAM tilted his cheek to catch Ryder’s focus. “That’s why you’ve put this off so late, isn’t it?”

“Aww hell, SAM.”

It was a night for remembering indeed, but of course _SAM _would have to remind him what tonight was actually for.

They sat and watched the night for a little while longer. The fathomless expanse of stars. The endless cooling darkness. It still called to the Pathfinder—like the sounds of the sea that once beckoned him away from the shore as a boy, and now called to him from the opposite shore.

What an impossible mission: Pathfinder. Connecting the stars. Inventing new constellations. To think he had loved someone who believed it was possible. And, as the oldest living human, he supposed he really could have done it. He kept aging and SAM kept finding ways to reverse the process. He kept looking at the stars and finding reasons to look back down at the sleeping form across the bed.

Even now, as SAM patiently waited to be removed from his mind, he found himself drawing lines in the heavens, just to make up for lost time. He was lonely, he tired of immortality. And he’d lived out the promises he’d made, at last. Once SAM disconnected, he would be truly alone, and then he would fall asleep and join his friends.

And yet: there was still so much wonder waiting. The Mordin-Brodie bridge was nearly ready to extend. The fact that Ryder had been able to attend the funeral of his friend, the Patriarch Mordin, had been a marvel he never would have imagined. The last mission was almost too unfathomable to be believed, but here he was, watching the stars. Procrastinating on every point of light in the sky. Drawing whatever lines would help him understand his place in the endless, bright trail of this story.

No matter. Here goes.

“Aright SAM. I guess we better do this, huh?”

SAM chuckled in the reflection.

“There’s no ‘we’ in this, Pathfinder. My part comes later.”

“Well then, how about you show our friend in and then gimme some privacy?”

The program was in his mind, _part _of him. He could converse with it as if ruminating on his own thoughts. But for this, it seemed appropriate to _see _tonight’s honored guest.

“As you wish,” SAM acquiesced. The room’s holo emitters came online, and SAM’s image in the dark glass and all the stars beyond were washed out by the radiance of a swirling Prothean hologram.

“Chronological marker not acquired…”

“Hello Vigil,” Ryder said softly. He knew enough about VIs to know the program was ‘staring’ at him. “Do you remember who I am?”

“Pathfinder Ryder.”

“And do you remember where you are?”

“Vash-aqla. The Andromeda Galaxy.”

“Good. How do you feel?”

“I do not feel,” Vigil said placidly. “My program is well maintained.”

“How do we set a course if there’s too many stars, Vigil?”

“I do not understand.”

“I called you here tonight to add to your story. But, to be honest, a galaxy away: it seems like the story of Andromeda is a drop in the bucket. A little star lost in a sea of stars.”

“I am ready, then.”

Ryder snickered.

“I wish it were that simple for me.”

“What do you mean?”

Ryder though for a long time.

“When I tell my kids, my _descendants_, really, about Heleus. About Meridian. About the Jardaan. About the Kett and the Apelost. It’s easy to get lost,” he whispered, at last. “I’ve heard your story must be a hundred times, Vigil. Tell me how you keep everything straight?”

The question came out more plaintive than Ryder had meant it to. He touched his wedding ring again to ground himself. Vigil, of course, picked up little of the subtle emotion.

“Long ago, I was given a purpose. When it was completed, I ‘died’, from a certain point of view. But Doctor T’soni brought me back, and gave me a new purpose. I was designed to watch over the people of the galaxy—my galaxy. Then, Doctor T’soni told me my vigilance was rewarded, tasked me to remember those who had lived and died. To make sure that, in 10,000 years, people remember_._ To spread the message that faith is rewarded. That we can do the impossible. That the choices are hard. That one person can inspire the universe.”

Ryder chuckled.

“And SAM wondered why I was so nervous about this.”

“When you came here, did you have faith?”

Ryder shifted in his chair.

“Yes.”

“And was that faith rewarded?”

“It was.”

“Did you touch the lives you were entrusted with?”

Ryder swallowed hard.

“Yes.”

“And you carry them with you?”

“Every day. Every day.”

“And you did the impossible.”

“Yes.”

“Were the choices hard?”

Ryder closed his eyes.

“Yes.”

“Pathfinder Ryder,” Vigil said at last, “Then you have changed the universe. And I want to hear your story.”

Ryder nodded, looked one last time at his wedding band.

“Alright. But you go first. I love to hear it.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I know it's not much, but they're important little stories to me and I am honestly so grateful you took the time to read. You are the best and I really mean that.


End file.
